Quotes

[on being requested to provide a less restrictive costume] Jennifer Lopez asked me if I could make it more comfortable, but I said, "No, you're supposed to be tortured".

About working on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985): I wanted the sets to be more aggressively assertive. It would be like the sets themselves were characters, as though they were actors, and they would challenge the real actors. So that when the sets and the actors came together, they'd set off a spark and a new kind of energy.

Roman Polanski, while making Chinatown (1974), first proposed to define clearly the position of production designer. Polanski said that a film should be made with three heads working in finely tuned balance. One head is the production designer, who has full responsibility for visual elements in the film. Another is the director of photography, who has full responsibility for the images. And then there's the position called the director. It's the director who has overall responsibility. These three heads should steer a film production. And the production designer, ideally, would oversee everything from the film's title design to props and costumes to makeup and sets-all the visual elements of the film.

Yukio Mishima was, like other noted people in history, a very complex human being. Especially to live like he did in Japanese society. I think his complexity as a person ran quite deep. I thought it was possible to express that complexity visually to a certain degree.

I want to keep the audience in suspense until the very end of the show.

Everywhere on Earth is my studio. Everything on Earth is my material.

Japanese people often ask me about logical reasons for creativity, as do many Americans-so much so that I realize that sometimes the basic attitude toward creation is that you have to build some logical reason around it. But sometimes I want to forget about logical reasons.

I'm always standing on the tip of my toes, at the edge of a cliff. I feel like that often. If you're careless, you'll fall and die, but that's when you take a stand and survive; I had many moments like this. That's the essence of creativity.

Reference is only reference. I never take a design element straight from the source.

Technique is just technique; it's not a final purpose. If I don't have enough technique, I can't get the kind of effect I want, so technique is important; but it has to be behind creativity, behind philosophy. We mustn't forget that people can drink water very nicely with just bamboo grass made into a cup. This is the spirit of design.

Blood and violence are the quickest way to get attention. But they're too easy, and it's not good manners to communicate to people in this way. I don't like violent subjects or expressions.

I don't want to stay with just one style or technique. I can't. When I was young I decided I didn't want to use just one style to describe my character. That's too limiting, too logical. I'm not interested in a closed, select field. Like doing portraits and showing in a beautiful gallery.

I need a strong impact because my work appears in the street or subway or in department stores-in busy circumstances, not in quiet, fancy galleries or controlled architectural spaces. My context is like junk, like Times Square. My competition is tough. My wish is that busy passersby stop to look at my work, even for just a second. I must be conscious of time, because busy people are always thinking of other things. If someone looks at the poster for one second, it's a success, but three seconds, five seconds, is perfect. I have to think how to get them to stop. This is very hard creativity.

When I was in my twenties I asked, what is graphic design? In my thirties I asked, what is art direction? And now in my forties I ask, what is art?